


the evolution of dana

by wellhellofuture



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Cancer Arc, Character Study, Episode: s01e01 Pilot, Episode: s05e02 Redux II, Episode: s07e17 All Things, F/M, Movie: The X-Files: Fight the Future (1998), References To:, mentions of diana fowley
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-19
Updated: 2021-02-19
Packaged: 2021-03-16 00:09:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29567298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wellhellofuture/pseuds/wellhellofuture
Summary: Scully through the years.
Relationships: Fox Mulder/Dana Scully
Comments: 2
Kudos: 7





	the evolution of dana

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Incrementum](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11050092) by [lepusarcticus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lepusarcticus/pseuds/lepusarcticus). 



> I read a good portion of Incrementum by @lepusarcticus shortly before writing this. While I have been careful to avoid pilfering any ideas or content, I would be remiss to not acknowledge such a wonderful work, whose style and creativity went a long way in helping to shape this piece into what it is.
> 
> Please be kind; this is my first dabble into writing TXF and there are incredibly talented fans who have been loving and reading and writing these characters quite literally since before I was born.

Brand new and squalling, red in face and hair, squirming in annoyance at the frigid, unwelcoming reality of her new world. She enters the world swinging her fists and demanding attention, winning over doctors and mother in mere moments. An exhausted, radiant Maggie smiles proudly at an already-infatuated Ahab and the three curious babushka heads peering over the starched hospital bed. “Say hello to Dana,” she says. 

\- 

Eight and jealous, of Bill’s bravery and Charlie’s cleverness and Missy’s popularity. Everything comes so easily to her siblings - always picked first at baseball, commandeering the remote during every minute of their allotted nightly television, even being tall enough to ride the biggest rides at the fair. She is oft ignored, by the cootie-dripping boys and the cliquey giggling girls of the streets of military bases around the world. Her mother coddles and reproaches, her father instructs and teaches - yet despite their devoted care she yearns for the ease of being she senses from her elder siblings. 

She remains the littlest smallest shyest Scully, and she vows in skinned knees and stifled yawns to carve a place for herself. 

\- 

Fourteen and bold, pushing the limits of Missy’s patience as she trails along to every after school hangout and group date. Missy is carefree and haphazard, rolling out of bed looking attractively mussed, while she herself wastes precious minutes patting down strawberry frizz and dabbing lavender on her wrists. The boys Missy teases with sultry smiles and skimpy tops pay the kid sister little mind, but she doesn’t care, lapping up the indulgent attention from Missy’s girlfriends. Their lazily popped bubbles of gum waft saccharine across dingy Formica tabletops and she files away the art of the calculated blasé. 

She has lost the timidness of her childhood, inserting herself into the he-said-she-said of teenage drama while blissfully ignoring the put-upon exasperated sighs from her sister. She trusts the quiet tenderness and affection that hide behind her Missy’s carefully crafted exterior, made ever the more obvious when her eyes spark viridian fire the first time she stumbles upon a boy crowding her baby sister into the corner of a bathroom hallway. 

\- 

Seventeen and rebellious, smoking brazenly on the back steps and going to third base with her boyfriend of the month in her parents’ driveway by the glow of the motion light. She itches against the bonds of propriety, of right and wrong and militant rules, aches for the thrill of verbal sparring and the guilty-sweet rush of shame at being caught. The hypnotic bounce of the golden cross she wears against her chest is nearly as titillating as the dance of male fingers over her skin, and she finds appreciation in the new curves she has just begun to flaunt. 

She flirts with ruin, sneaks far too many swigs of bourbon from her father’s stash to avoid being noticed and lingers smoky exhales over her mother’s shoulder. She only quits when, while picking the lock to the liquor cabinet with a stray hairpin, the glint of a key purposely left out sours the heady spike of disobedience. 

\- 

Twenty-two and feverishly determined, singleminded in her fight to memorize every text, predict every exam question. She rides the high of young adult intellectualism, the addictive kick that only comes from rich-smelling tomes and clacking keyboards. Feeling just dangerous enough to rewrite the greats, she boldly signs her John Hancock on an acidic critique of the work of the founding father of physics. The constant chaos of science calls to her, the never-the-same excitement of case studies and breaking edge research propelling her into long nights folded double over long-etched tables in the physics library. 

One by one, her friends earn sparkly adornments to their fingers, her closet filling up with slippery satins and monochromatic taffeta, but she chooses to find fulfillment in the invigorating rush of attractive force and molecular chemistry. 

(The week after her first set of medical school finals, she allows herself the luxury of her own jewelry: a glittering ring in her navel. She lays down under the needle for the thrill of spontaneity and for the heat in her lover’s eyes when he first glances the glint of sparkle against puckered pink skin.) 

\- 

Twenty-five and jaded, the laboriousness of science - once comforting and predictable - now bores her. She is taught to welcome consistency, in numbers and patients and conclusions. A part of her shrivels and dies when she realizes that to heal is to remove all that is unusual and intriguing in the human condition, to fight against entropy to restore a system to order. Monotonous, repetitive diagnoses blur together, only interrupted by the briefest flashes of electrifying clarity, first during her midnight shifts assisting the triage team, and later stumbling into tucked-away storage closets with a man old enough to be her father. Her affair, tantalizing and invigorating as it is, cannot be sustained, the spontaneous combustion withering under side eyes from an angry young daughter and the scent of another woman’s perfume. Even her adrenaline-addicted amygdala yields to the insistency of her guilty conscience. 

She puts the decision off as long as she can, torn between the life her parents want and the glamorous danger that tempts her from behind tinted aviators and graphic windbreakers. Pulled in one direction by a man she regrets falling for, in the other by a sense of duty and thrill, she thumbs through residency placements and employment contracts with equal senses of conviction and doubt. 

In the end, she determines complacency an unforgivable concession, so she shirks the temptation of stability and invites disapproval, fleeing into the welcome embrace of the FBI. 

\- 

Twenty-nine and cocky, confident she can expertly and professionally apply her years of experience to systematically prove her worth to her superiors. Assured that she is far above falling prey to the crazed musings of the enigmatic man who eagerly takes on the role of skeleton in the government’s closet. She is pushed and tested and tried anew each day, but refuses to yield even an inch. She stands staunchly in the camp of science and refuses to relinquish her religion despite her new partner’s insistence that all the random facts in the universe culminate into something undefinably more. 

She laughs in the rain in Oregon, pulls a gun on fellow scientists in the Arctic, and survives ancient parasites in Washington, and she wonders if this is what living is like. 

\- 

Thirty-three and resigned to her fate, damned as much by her association to Fox Mulder as his own allegiance to her. Regretting the chances she did not take, the opportunities she ignored with a willfully blind eye, but content with the life she’s built for herself. Filled with sorrow only for those whom she knows she will hurt by leaving them behind: her poor mother, her already broken family, her partner. Concerned as always with Mulder’s safety before her own, desperate for him to finally find some semblance of a life outside of their basement existence. 

She pretends to sleep when he visits, uses all the strength the chemo and radiation have not yet stripped from her cells to keep herself from tugging him to her emaciated breast. She tells herself that her wager is worth the price, that depriving them both of comfort now will mean a quicker recovery later once she’s gone. She tries to save him from himself and it is worse than she expected, her doomed Icarus already stepping seamlessly into the role of martyr and avenger. 

She appeases her mother, makes peace with her God, exchanges wordless apologies with her brother - but she cannot bring herself to say goodbye to him. 

\- 

thirty-four and cold cold cold so cold she’s never been this cold before and her neck aches and there’s a funny feeling in her stomach pulsing and stretching and evolving and she cannot see can barely feel can hardly even remember what it’s like to breathe and walk and be warm and there is sickly sticky pressure all around primordial ooze slipping past her limbs and it is dark dark dark and green everything is green and there are little Foxes dancing behind her eyelids urging her to just sleeeeeeep

_he is coming he is coming I know he is coming he has to be coming he will never stop coming to me_

\- 

Thirty-five and burning with vicious jealousy, green blood pumping through her veins, the feeling as foreign and familiar as the sizzling stench of alien death. She has been the other woman, too many times for comfort, but this is wholly new, bitter and knife-sharp like the time she slit her palm over slippery tomatoes while he distracted her over the phone. When Diana is shot, the physician in her is silenced, pushed down by the ancient compulsion in her, to protect and defend and lay claim to what is her own. It takes the scared glances of a little boy to urge her into action, and she despises herself while taking grim pride in the reawakening of her long-dormant feminine urges. 

She had not expected her nemesis (how odd it is, having a nemesis, unspoken yet wholly understood) to simply turn belly up like a rotting fish, but it strips her raw nonetheless - that is her chair, her autopsies, her messy and unreliable and self-destructive partner cum friend cum everything. She is humiliated under the spray of fruitless decon showers, stripped bare and vulnerable beneath knowing glances and obtuse denials. A smoky voice on his phone, the smell of her on his coat, a scoff and dismissal in the face of undeniable evidence. 

She has at turns believed in evil, and fate, and miracles, but never before has she allowed herself such pure, undiluted hatred. 

If anything could have redeemed her, this modern Bathsheba, it was this: a book and a key card, and the absolving confession of a barefooted, bandaged man. 

-

Thirty-six and tired, exhausted from the years of no resolution, of the second guessing and wishful thinking and baseless hoping. Strung out from the millions of maybes, of moments where it seems the most minuscule of catalysts should have sent them careening towards one another across consoles and files and adjoining hotel doors. 

At first she expects more from the new year, decade, century, millennium - some cosmic force, perhaps, acting for once in their favor rather than creating chaos to unravel over rental car mileage and reams of reports. Instead it is more of the same: crazed fanatics, dead parents, and amorphous monsters feeding on fear of the unknown. 

Her rebellious streak gets the better of her once more, and she acts out in an uncharacteristic (or is it?) grab for scientific progress, or maybe second chances, but mostly _look this is how it feels when you leave me, come find me, be angry with me, make me feel something_. 

She emerges antsy and spurned, and on uneasy standing she turns down a plane ticket, instead falling back into the habits of a young student with something to prove. She allows herself the indulgence of belief, just this once, after all this time, and is left reeling by a trail of crumbs dropped over the past seven years that comes to a head when she sees God in the beating of a man’s heart. 

It hits her then, what she has not yet been able to grasp despite her years of careful study: there is not one Dana, nor many, but she contains multitudes, all of which leading to the culmination of decisions eons in the making, for she was destined to become this woman, to live this life of uncertainty and challenge and, yes, such wonder. 

Clear headed and sure, she drifts off under a woven blanket on a leather couch and knows that whatever is to come, she will not face it alone.

**Author's Note:**

> For Kel, because without her I would not have found the X-Files. The show and the fans surrounding it have become such a comfort during this season of upheaval we all have found ourselves in, but Kel, thanks a million for the introduction & for listening to all my screaming messages in your DMs. You are truly amazing.
> 
> I have only watched up through season 7, so any continuity/character questions post-Requiem need not apply. Once I finish the series, I may come back and add a few more vignettes of older Scully, mostly because she intrigues me so damn much.
> 
> Thanks for reading!


End file.
